train ain't coming back! Before the Lord,
they're going _west_!"

Back to Meechum's Station, from body and top of the out-going train
floated wild cheering. "Staunton! We're going to Staunton! We're going
back to the Valley! We're going home! We're going to get there first!
We're going to whip Banks! We've got Old Jack with _us_. You all hurry
up. Banks thinks we've gone to Richmond, but we ain't! _Yaaaih!
Yaaaaihhh! Yaaaih! Yaaaaaaih!_"

At Meechum's Station, beneath the locust trees, it was like bees
swarming. Another train was on the main track, the head beautifully,
gloriously westward! "Staunton! Good-bye, you little old Richmond, we
ain't going to see you this summer!--Feel good? I feel like a shouting
Methodist! My grandmother was a shouting Methodist. I feel I'm going to
shout--anyhow, I've got to sing--"

A chaplain came by with a beaming face. "Why don't we all sing, boys?
I'm sure I feel like it. It's Sunday."

How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord--

In Staunton it had been a day of indigo gloom. The comfortable Valley
town, fair-sized and prosperous, with its pillared court house, its old
hotel, its stores, its up and down hill streets, its many and shady
trees, its good brick houses, and above the town its quaintly named
mountains--Staunton had had, in the past twelve months, many an unwonted
throb and thrill. To-day it was in a condition of genuine, dull, steady
anxiety, now and then shot through by a fiercer pang. There had been in
town a number of sick and convalescent soldiers. All these were sent
several days before, eastward, across the mountains. In the place were
public and military stores. At the same time, a movement was made toward
hiding these in the woods on the other side of the twin mountains Betsy
Bell and Mary Grey. It was stopped by a courier from the direction of
Swift Run Gap with a peremptory order. _Leave those stores where they
are._ Staunton grumbled and wondered, but obeyed. And now the evening
before, had come from Port Republic, eighteen miles toward the Blue
Ridge, a breathless boy on a breathless horse, with tidings that Jackson
was at last and finally gone from the Valley--had crossed at Brown's Gap
that morning! "Called to Richmond!" groaned the crowd that accompanied
the boy on his progress toward official Staunton. "Reckon Old Joe and
General Lee think we're small potatoes and few in a row. They ain't,
either of them, a Valley man. Reckon this time t